Water Triage

I read a document over the winter that scared the living daylights out of me. 

It’s the province’s Draft Triage Protocols for Covid 19. When there's a certain number of COVID patients in the ICUs, teams of doctors will make decisions about which newly arriving patients get care. If two doctors agree a patient has an 80% chance of being alive a year from now, they get the care. There are two other levels of triage involving whether a patient has a 50% or 35% chance of survival. When there are huge demands and limited resources, rationing is required and hard decisions have to be made, no matter how we got here or how awful it might seem.

We made one of those hard decisions last night at Collingwood Town Council. There are quite a few people who are disappointed in the vote to bring in an Interim Control Bylaw, and I don't blame them one bit. 

I’m disappointed, too, mostly that such a move was necessary. But I believe it was necessary and that’s why I voted for it, even while feeling nauseated and frustrated and appalled. Hopefully, the communications from town hall on this issue will lead to a better understanding for everybody.

The hard fact is, we don't currently have enough water to supply all the development 'on the books'  between now and when we fill the tanks at a new water treatment facility. 

For reasons I don’t entirely understand, we didn’t find out until early this year that during the winter months, Collingwood's water treatment plant can only make around 20,000 cubic litres of clean water per day. In summer, the plant can provide more than 31,000 litres. Cold water doesn’t take up chlorine the way warm water does and there were warnings about it in staff reports in previous years, but it wasn’t until very recently that this new calculation was completed and verified by the Ministry of the Environment. We knew capacity was less in cold weather, but we didn't know by how much. Now we know.

It's a new number. It's new news. I repeat: it’s a new number. 

There’s been talk of replacing the water treatment plant for a long, long time, but it just didn’t get built for ... reasons. There were even designs made and approved, but not built.

One of the very first council votes I was part of, in January of 2019, was to go ahead with the first steps -again- toward building a new water treatment plant. There were concerns about capacity articulated at the time, but we definitely thought we were on track to continue meeting all water needs until the new plant would open, sometime in 2025. It was going to be close, but there was a dovetail imagined where the number of new homes and businesses would grow, and, just in time, we would have that new plant ready. 

This new calculation means we’re about four years off. If all goes well, we -maybe- can squeeze out enough water supply for a total of 1048 new homes and businesses in the interim, but only in the best case scenario, which is if we cut some of the supply to New Tecumseth and use extra chlorine in the winter. We can get more if we build an add-on tank to treat extra water, but that's going to take about two years to install.

I voted to make the best of a terrible, horrible, no-good, really bad situation. If we can supply only 1048 units before the plant comes online, I want us to be thoughtful and deliberate. I want us to make choices in the best interest of the community rather than letting the chips fall where they may, since the way planning works, water allocation is first-come, first served. 

The only way to definitively take control of the hoped-for additional water supply is to bring in an Interim Control Bylaw. You’ll notice the first word is INTERIM. Short term. Plans and proposals can still come to town hall and go through the planning process. The ICBL is the only instrument we have, though, to prevent the final step, a building permit, because the rules say we can’t give a building permit without water to service the build. 

I got accused this morning of taking the ‘easy way out’. Well, there was no ‘easy way’ here that I could see. It's easy to say we could just turn off the water to New Tech and keep all our supply. I somehow doubt it would be easy to cut off the water to the family in Alliston whose sink and bathtub and washing machine use water from Collingwood.

It's easy to say we could just add more chlorine to the water. We’re allowed to have up to 4mg/l of chlorine in our water. It’s not easy to swallow that much chlorine, though, since it tastes and smells terrible. A higher level of chlorine is also not easy on the equipment at factories or your clothes. A higher level of chlorine is also not easy on the equipment at the current water plant or the workers who are putting it in the water. 

It would have been easiest if we'd built a new water plant several years ago. I love this idea! I wish earlier councils had built a new plant. I also wish all the repeated rounds of negotiation with New Tech had been fruitful. I wish someone had done this calculation sooner. I wish we weren’t in this pickle. As my dear departed dad used to say, “If wishes were fishes, we’d have lots to eat.”

What happens now? Well, among other things and in no particular order:

• You can continue to trust the safety of Collingwood's water.
• The projects that have building permits in hand will go ahead. 
• Projects that don't yet have building permits will continue the process up until the final steps.
  
• Some people will not get to move here when they were expecting to, which will make some people happy and some people angry.
  
• House prices will rise, which will make some people happy and other people angry.
  
• People will still renovate, including bathrooms, decks and additions. 
• You will fill your pool if you have one, otherwise, you will join me in the lake.
  
• We will put out a request for proposals in the next couple of weeks for a new water plant, and build it as soon as possible. 
• We will add a little more chlorine to our water sometimes.
  
• We will try to take back some of the supply to New Tecumseth and Blue Mountain. 
• We will install a separate tank to treat some more water. 
• We will start a process to decide which projects get the scarce water we can supply, (the maybe1048 and possibly more)
• We'll be asking for your help making the list mentioned above. (Should affordable/attainable housing projects be at the top of it? Maybe start thinking about that.)
  
• We’ll continue work on our Official Plan, making decisions on what kind of town we want to be. 

I sure hope the weather is nice for the ribbon cutting on the replacement water plant, and I truly hope no one has to wear a mask to the ceremony.